Category Archives: Blog

Revamping X-cart Customer Reward Points!

10 years ago in November is when we released what became our flagship product! I can’t believe it’s been that long already! Time has flown by and it’s well past due a complete overhaul!

This year we’ll be releasing a major update to our infamous X-cart Customer Reward Points module and we need your help! We have molded it and changed it along the way based upon customer feedback and we want to make the new version even better than before! Contact Us to make your suggestion and be eligible for a FREE software upgrade to the latest version! We’re looking to get all requests by March 15th, 2014.

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Authorize.net CIM for Magento

Our Authorize.net CIM for X-cart has been so popular we created an Authorize.net CIM for Magento as well! We saw the need for a good, flexible CIM module for Magento and extended our knowledge of creating it for X-cart and created it for Magento too.

With our Magento CIM module you can have even more flexibility to allow the customer to opt out of storing their credit card. You can use their PA-DSS compliant iframe or their standard on-site payment form. It also works with Magento’s One Page Checkout and their Multi-step Checkout!

Check out the screen shots for our Authorize.net CIM Magento Module on our sister site and full feature list!

Don’t have Authorize.net yet?

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Christmas hours 2013

We will be OPEN for the Holiday weeks! We value being able to help you even during the holiday weeks! So we will be open the next few weeks. However we do value having our staff visit with family and friends during this time, so we will not be at full staff. Each staff member is taking off at different times but someone will be in the office on business days. All staff will be out of the office on Christmas Eve, Christmas and New Years. We will be servicing urgent/site down needs during those days and filling orders at least once a day.

We hope you have a great holiday and safe New Year!

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Responsive Design vs Mobile Design

We get asked many times whether to go with a Mobile design or Responsive design. The simple answer is: “It depends.”

When to go with a Mobile design for your eCommerce store.

We find it’s most economical to go with a mobile design for your eCommerce store when you already have an established store and aren’t currently wanting to upgrade or redo the look of the store. With our Mobile Module for X-cart we can customize the look to match your current current X-cart store.

When to go with a Responsive design for your eCommerce store.

We find it’s most economical to go with a responsive design for your eCommerce store when you are wanting to redo the look and feel and/or are upgrading your website. This makes it the easiest and most efficient way to get a responsive design by coding the template to be responsive from the start. It can be very inefficient to translate an existing code and CSS set into a responsive framework. So this is best done when you are already creating a new fresh look. We feel currently that responsive is the way to go in general because you then have only one set of files, css, etc to change if you want to change some items on your site. But it’s best to switch to responsive when creating a new look or upgrading.

Check out our new Magento Store which gives you a sneak peek at the new design coming to BCSE as well as our work making a responsive template!

What about SEO, is Mobile or Responsive better?

It really just depends on doing the one you pick well! If either is done well, then it will work well for SEO. Google for example recognizes both types of mobile design solutions. There is even a recent article about Google’s Matt Cutts answering these questions. You can read the full article here.

Contact Us to see how we can help your business become mobile ready!

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Holy Cow we had an Earthquake

Wow. Just before we were getting up to have our monthly staff meeting (3 weeks late! you guys have been keeping us busy!), several of us felt our desks shake and heard the ceiling tiles shift! Apparently a small town just 9 miles away from us had a 3.5 earth quake! We don’t know yet if there’s been any damage but that was really bizarre for us since they aren’t frequent in Ohio!

Check out the earthquake info.

This entry was posted in Around the Office, Blog, Events on by .

Password Strength

Many of us at BCSE enjoy xkcd’s comics (www.xkcd.com) since most of the time they are technical and thought provoking in nature. There is one particular comic though that really stood out to us to be very true and highly useful for ecommerce and password strength. We felt it was so good at helping customers create better passwords that we would write about it here.

Too many times we find customers give us passwords that are even more insecure than their example. So try to keep this theory in mind when creating your passwords and remember to rotate your passwords every month or so! Computers are getting extremely good at brute force guessing of passwords.

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BCSE Turns 11 Today!

Today BCSE turns 11! We wouldn’t be here with out you!

To celebrate we’re offering 15% off to everyone for any BCSE module in the store! Simply use coupon 11Anniversary15 to get your discount! Good for 11 days! (until November 24th)

Newsletter subscriber? If you’re a newsletter subscriber, check your email later today for an even BIGGER coupon off!

In our we Turned 9 entry, I describe a bit about our history. Did you know that we thought of BCS Engineering while driving our then 10 month old child to his grandparents? I can still remember where we were on the road that day when we came up with our idea and name. It’s like a photo snapshot in my head of me looking at us in the car at that moment. Since that day our lives have greatly changed. We are so thankful to have you, our customers and our friends, as part of our lives!

Carrie

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X-cart Security Patch Released

X-cart just released a Security Patch for X-Cart 4.4.0-4.6.1

Did you know that not applying security patches is the #1 reason we see sites get hacked? It’s really a simple process you can do yourself or hire someone to do that can greatly protect your site and business!

While X-cart has listed this as a ‘moderate’ threat, we highly recommend that every X-cart have the patch applied. The vulnerabilities include XSS which means cross site scripting. XSS is a serious security vulnerability and can allow hackers to potentially get into your database and really wreck your site.

X-cart provides a how-to on how to apply patches yourself. If you are not comfortable with this process, we also provide X-cart Security Patching Services. Contact us to get your quote! Prices depend on the number of patches to be installed.

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We’ve been Busy this Summer!

BCSE Update

We’ve had minimal blog posts this summer because you guys are keeping us so busy! That’s good in a way but it’s also always good to do updates.

Internally, we’ve been working on a new look and feel. We’re super excited to reveal it! It is complete with a Responsive Design.

Our goal is to have the new site up by the end of this year. We’ve over the past 5 years customized our current X-cart and support systems it’s taking a while to finish the upgrades up. Plus we are moving our content site into WordPress. So we’re having to transfer the data out of our current CMS to WordPress.

We also have a new website brewing for us on a new domain/platform. We’re super excited to reveal it and hope to have it ready in a few weeks. This site will also feature our new look and responsive design.

Stay tuned for the new sites!

Client Project Updates

We have been busy also with some really cool client projects this summer including:

  • Complex product importing
  • Complex Make, Model, Year
  • Complex X-cart Upgrades
  • Responsive X-cart Designs
  • Custom Schema.org applications for both X-cart and Magento
  • Personalized Stationery Magento Customization
  • And much more!

Contact Us to quote your next project!

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